Guest Comments by the Civic Party

One of Hong Kong’s leading political groups, the Civic Party plays a leading role in the fight for long-overdue universal suffrage. Recently, the party issued the following declaration.

HONG KONG -- The Civic Party declares its new plan to fight for universal suffrage.

Hong Kong’s democracy movement has reached a critical juncture. Therefore, we call for united action to battle for a roadmap that will give Hong Kong’s people genuine universal suffrage by no later than 2017 and 2020.

Genuine universal suffrage means that when electing a Hong Kong chief executive, there must be no “pre-election” or “screening” of candidates as part of the nomination procedures. For Legislative Council elections, genuine universal suffrage means the abolition of all functional constituencies.

If the central government in Beijing declares and commits to the implementation of genuine-universal-suffrage principles in 2017 and 2020, and if a roadmap to reach this goal is put forward by Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang in his upcoming political-reform consultation, then the Civic Party is ready to discuss all reasonable models for the 2012 elections as a transitional arrangement.

If no roadmap appears, then the Civic Party will set in motion a Three-Stage Fight Plan For Universal Suffrage and invite fellow pan-democrats to stand together.

In the first stage, pan-democrats would unite to demand that Tsang give the people a roadmap for genuine universal suffrage.

The second stage would be to force by-elections. If Tsang still fails to produce a roadmap, the Civic Party will join forces with other democrats to trigger a popular vote against the government’s 2012 package. This will be achieved by the resignation of five legislators, causing by-elections. For discussion, we propose the following pan-democratic legislators as those who would tender their resignations: Tanya Chan, Alan Leong, Frederick Fung, Leung Kwok-hung and Lee Wing-tat. In the by-election campaign, we’d use slogans about “fighting for a roadmap” and “vetoing the government’s fake-democracy package”.

Stage three of our plan calls for the resignations of all pan-democratic legislators. After the by-elections, democrats would give Tsang a year to produce a roadmap for universal suffrage. If he still fails, all 23 pan-democratic legislators would resign in protest.

They’d also demand Tsang’s resignation for violating his 2007 campaign pledges.

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